Wind
by EllieF
Summary: The title still wears Near instead of the other way around, but a new case forces him to re-examine what it means to be L. Post one-shot story. Features the SPK, feats of tarot-card engineering, and a foul-mouthed ghost.
1. Opening Moves

**Notes**: This slightly overlaps the Weekly Shonen Jump one-shot.

**Chapter 1**

On windy days, Near sometimes goes to the rooftop garden. None of the neighboring buildings are taller than L's headquarters, and with all the trees he had put here, no one can see him anyway. He can see Battery Park from here, but this little urban oasis is private. The air currents are capricious this high up, and Near likes to let them wash over him. It makes him feel closer to Mello, but within controlled parameters.

He needs that today. He knows what he's going to do about C-Kira—or not do, rather—and he knows it's going to make people angry. He doesn't care what _they_ think.

_That guy's a punk_, Mello says. _He's not worth our time._

He's right, of course.

Even when Mello was still alive, but after he left the House, Near sometimes talked to him. Not like now, when Mello actually answers, but he's always been there. Near knows it's weird to imagine that his dead rival talks to him, but he doesn't want to examine it too closely, because then Mello might stop.

He spreads his arms and tilts his head back, and the wind takes his hair and the baggy shirt like twin banners. It blows away the last of his uncertainty.

He hears the door back in to the building open, and stands up normally and crosses his arms.

Lidner steps out and watches him for a moment, wearing a faint smile. "It's freezing up here. Aren't you worried you'll get sick?"

"No," Near says. People who don't know him often assume he's sickly—he's still slight for his age, and he'll never be anything but pale—but Lidner knows better. She must be merely casting about for something to say. "You can go back in," he says. "I'll be down in a little while."

But she shoves her hands into her jacket pockets and comes closer, past the flowerbeds that are just bare plots this time of year, and shakes her hair out of her face. "This case is making you angry."

"Yes," Near says, frowning. Its tackiness annoys him, but he doesn't think she would understand.

"You think it's beneath L. Not you. _L_."

"If you want to put it that bluntly, yes. It's not meaningful at all."

"But... he _is_ killing people."

"He's a cheap little pretender with a toy, like a child who knocks over his building blocks just because he can. L has better things to do." He keeps his voice steady, but he still feels insulted on L's behalf, and maybe even, a little, on Light Yagami's. He was ignoble in defeat, yes, and wrong, but while the question of whether his ends justified his means is laughable, Near's not likely to forget that Kira almost won.

Lidner's silent for a moment. "Your story about L," she says. "You liked him more after you found out he didn't really care?"

Near reaches for his hair. "I don't think he was being entirely candid. I think he did care, but he wanted to see our reactions. It was a neat little way to show us his methods first-hand. L knew you have to be pragmatic to do his job. You have to use methods an idealist would balk at. Seeing yourself as some virtuous good guy has to be less important than solving the cases."

"But you _are_ a good guy," Lidner says.

"I act like one. Most of the time. Let's see if you still think that after this case."

* * *

He tries to make the team see why he can't take the case, but they don't really get it. Near wishes he could explain more clearly that it's impossible for him to do any more, that it's more than distaste: it's a wall he can't get through. There's only one path he can imagine following, and he doesn't even like to do that much, but it's L's responsibility.

_L is L, you are you_, Lidner said, but the world needs L to be _L_, and no one but Near can do it.

Three years, and title still wears him instead of the other way around, and try as he might, he doesn't fit it very well. He's more than smart enough to know this.

Trying to fit it has, possibly, made him a little cracked. Or maybe more than a little.

He's smart enough to see that, too.

The headquarters was built to his specifications, and it's so well-equipped that Near doesn't have to leave, and he seldom does. Everything's just the way he likes it—the way he needs it to do his best work. The large, mostly empty room has plenty of space for toy cities, or kiddie pools for ducks, or towers. He likes the cards best lately; he's gotten very good at building the towers high despite their fragility. The paintings on them are interesting, and some are quite pretty, but Near turns them all white-side up. He doesn't believe in fate.

The computer and media room opens off the largest room, and there are toys on the threshold and partway in, like an invading army of robots and spaceships, since Near hates to be empty-handed when all he's doing otherwise is looking at television screens. Today he picks up a rocket from the ranks, and goes to watch for any new developments in the C-Kira case. Nothing seems to be happening since he made his statement as L. The killings have stopped, but there's no other news.

Gevanni took over the Watari name when Roger retired. He's here today, and he greets Near as he comes in, then goes back to his email. He comes in to the headquarters a few times a week, and is never more than the click of a button away. The rest of the team is never completely out of touch either. Near knows Lidner and Rester don't wait around for him to contact them, but when he does, they always seem to be free to help.

He kept them in mind when he designed the floor plan. He doesn't use his own bedroom very much, but there's a room for each former SPK member in case they need to crash for a bit. There's a gym one floor down, because Gevanni wanted it, and a sort of lounge area off the kitchen. No one uses that. They come in, work as long as they have to, and leave. Near knows that Rester is married, that Gevanni has a sailboat, and that Lidner loves dim sum, but these are random facts picked up in the course of working with them. They don't exactly socialize.

_You're still afraid to care_, Mello says.

It's not fear. It's only prudent. If he'd cared more about Gevanni's safety than about catching Kira, he would never have sent him to touch the murder notebook and possibly confront a shinigami. If he'd cared about Mello... If...

_Nice try, squirt_.

* * *

Near still doesn't like to go out into the world unless he has to. There are too many people, and too much noise. He notices _everything_, and can't turn it off. To walk along a normal street is to be bombarded from all directions, and not even he can process that much data at once. So Gevanni goes out for him, and brings back groceries and toys. He runs errands, too, and does the cleaning-up Near doesn't get around to, though he likes things tidier than Gevanni does, and he does try. He tries to cook, too, but while the chemistry part of the process is easy, he hasn't quite mastered the art part, and his experiments tend to come out a bit strange.

He keeps an eye on the news for the next couple of weeks, but it seems obvious that C-Kira has stopped for good. Whether it's out of fear or out of repentance isn't that important.

The Japanese police either don't know any more than anyone else, or they're still pissed off about how L handled it, and they don't make contact. Near doesn't especially care about their reasons either.

Very quickly, most of the Kira worshippers online move on to the next fad. They'll come running back if another death note finds its way into the human world. If they learned nothing from the first Kira, they certainly won't learn anything from this one. For now, though, things go back to normal.

If normal is trying to live without letting in a breath of wind that might disturb paper fortresses; if normal is always asking how someone else would do things because _you_ never know instinctively. It's a balancing act that's almost impossible, this navigation between compulsion and ambition.

_If you hate walking the tightrope_, Mello says, almost singsong,_ you can always jump._

"No, I don't think I will," Near says.

"What was that?" Gevanni calls from the next room.

He didn't mean to answer out loud. "Nothing. Sorry if I disturbed you."

Gevanni comes to the doorway. "It's fine. I'm just looking through the paper. Everything OK here?"

"Yes." He has just wrapped up one case and profiled a suspect for the Chicago police in another, and now he's scrolling through wire reports, looking for interesting new cases.

"Well, if you—" Gevanni begins, then stops. "Huh."

"What is it?"

"It says here that Lawrence Carruthers was killed."

"May I see that?"

Gevanni comes over to the desk and hands over the paper, and Near scans the story quickly. "That's extremely unfortunate," he says. "It's also quite similar to how Rodrigo de la Cruz died, last week." He twirls his hair and compares the two incidents point by point. "I don't think it's a coincidence."

"Should I contact Halle and Anthony?"

Near really doesn't think it's a coincidence, but the fact that Gevanni immediately takes it so seriously makes him worry just a little. "Yes," he says. "Maybe you should."

* * *

They come in that afternoon, looking a bit surprised to be back so soon.

The giant card Ls are gone; they were done. Near sits in the middle of the empty floor, and starts building a tarot wall.

The team members follow him in, and sit on the sofa Gevanni moved in here.

"Rodrigo de la Cruz and Lawrence Carruthers are dead," Near says. "They were both found in their homes, in their beds. Both houses were broken into, but the London _Times_ and _El Mundo_ say the killer didn't take anything. He got in, shot them, and got out. One shot per victim. Other than the similar circumstances, there's only one link we know of."

"They're both detectives," Gevanni says. "And, except for L, of course, considered the top in their respective areas, correct?"

Near gets more cards and starts another wall, perpendicular to the first. "Correct," he says. "The worldwide rankings aren't official, or even widely agreed upon, but those two were both not too far below L on the list."

Rester and Gevanni exchange a glance, but Lidner's watching Near. "How sure are you that it's the same killer?"

Near smiles. The percentages have become almost a joke among the four of them. "Seventy percent sure. Of course, we'll need to look at the evidence to fill it in. We should also find out if there were any cases both of them worked on. I don't think it's very likely, but any connection between them could lead us to the killer. Lidner, would you research that?"

"Sure."

"Rester, since you're fluent in Spanish, could you talk to the police in Madrid and see what information they can give us? And please do the same for the investigators in London."

Rester nods.

They both go to do their respective tasks, and Near scoots down to the end of one of the walls and works on extending it, thinking about motives. One cannot target prominent detectives without having L in the back of one's mind, and Near suspects this killer has him rather closer to the front.

_The fucker's taunting us_, Mello says.

_He's trying to_, Near tells him. _You know it's difficult to provoke me._

The question is whether his ultimate target is actually L, or if this is some sort of twisted challenge the killer has given himself: getting to the very people who would try to stop him.

It's too early to answer that, but there has to be something he can do that isn't waiting for another killing.

He sends requests to Heathrow and Barajas, and refreshes all the email programs a couple of times, though he knows it's pointless. Until they get back to him, there's not much else he can do.

Not enough information, Near thinks. He's starting to feel hemmed in. "Gevanni?"

He pokes his head in. "Yes?"

"I'm going up to the roof. Come get me if there's any news."

"All right. Hey, Near. Wait." He pulls off his suit jacket and hands it over. "Take this."

These occasional displays of protectiveness aren't exactly professional, but all three of the former SPK members have them, and though Near is slightly puzzled by them, he doesn't really _mind_, as such. "Thank you."

It's chillier up here today, with a strong breeze coming off the water, and Near's rather glad to have the jacket after all. He sits on the lawn in the middle of the garden, plucks some grass, and lets the wind blow it blade by blade from his hand.

_Mello?_ he thinks. _What's making me so unsettled? I'm doing all I can, and I still don't feel quite right._

Mello laughs, and Near can see him, lounging on the couch in the House common room. _You're impatient. That's interesting._

_I guess I am._ He pulls some flowers from a patch of clover and starts linking them._ It's irrational._

_The possibility that they were killed to get our attention makes you feel bad._

_It shouldn't... but yes. It does._

_Welcome to the world of people with emotions._

_Mello, I've always had emotions._

He laughs again. _Try listening to them more._

_How would that help in this situation?_

_In _general, Mello says, then grins slyly. _Though it would be fun to see you explode from bottling 'em up._

Near sighs, and ties the ends of the flower chain together. _Sometimes, you're no help at all._

This is better, though; he feels less stifled. He makes the chain into a cat's cradle. _The killer's trying to set a trap_, he thinks, and turns it back into a circle with a few motions. _It won't work._

He watches the ships come in to the harbor, idly twisting the chain into a more complicated crown without looking at it. Would L be able to do anything more?

Probably not, but Near can't help but think that L would have already had a flash of insight that would grow into the answer. L wouldn't feel stuck.

He heads back inside, and meets Lidner in the hall.

"Hey. I was just coming to get you," she says. "Rester's just finishing talking to the English and Spanish investigators, and everyone's sending over their information."

"Good. Thanks."

"They were definitely killed with the same gun," Rester says once the team gathers in the main room. "No witnesses in either case. De la Cruz's closest neighbors were away when he was killed, and Carruthers lived out in the country, with his closest neighbors a mile away. No fingerprints, either. They're still sorting through various shoeprints, and they'll send their findings when they're done."

"This guy's pretty sure of himself," Near says. He eyes the card walls, and picks a spot for a watch tower. "He's counting on not being caught."

"He knows other detectives will pick up on what he's doing," Lidner says.

"Yes, and that's one thing that worries me."

"How so?"

"It suggests that he doesn't see the killings as murders. He sees them as opening moves in a chess game." Near scowls, but he's aware of the irony. "I think I might be better at that than he is."


	2. Showoff

Updated with a bit more toward the end on 4/9/08.

**Chapter 2**

Near has had the evidence they've got at the moment memorized for hours, and, because of the time difference, the airport authorities still haven't responded. He finishes the walls of the castle and sits in its courtyard, trying to think of what to do.

_If he's playing chess, we should knock his pieces off the board_, Mello says.

The problem is finding out where his pieces are, how they're arranged, and what that means about his plan. All Near can guess right now is that the killer wants L to attack. That won't happen.

He hasn't slept in a couple of days, but when he goes to his room, it's to get the bar of Vosges from the nightstand drawer. He sits on the bed and takes a small bite, and though the thought barely forms in his mind, he hears Mello laugh.

_Of _course_ I would taste like chocolate. We've been over this before._ This time he's in his room at the House, stacks of books, drifts of paper, and all. Near's pretty sure he sees an unflattering caricature of himself in the margin of some class notes, and wonders, not for the first time, whether his subconscious is hopelessly broken.

_It really ought to be dark chocolate_, Mello observes.

_I know, but I don't like it._

_Wimp._

Mello's teasing often means that Near's worried he has missed something. _Do you think there's more we could be doing?_

_No. Annoying, huh?_ He seems to be making a paper airplane.

_Yes, fine. I'm annoyed._

_I think you'll need me before this is over_, Mello says, and launches the airplane into wobbly flight.

_You think I'll need to act like you?_

_Not a bad idea anyway._

_I couldn't manage it._ He gets a brief and troubling mental image of himself dressed in black and holding a gun.

_I _did_ have style._

_Yes._ He must be tired; he isn't usually sentimental.

He doesn't realize he was actually tired enough to sleep until he wakes up, curled on top of the covers. The clock on the nightstand says 5:45.

The fax machines have started churning out passenger lists, and there are messages to say the security footage has been couriered over. The card castle needs a keep, but Near can't stop thinking about Carruthers and de la Cruz. It feels wrong to let them go unacknowledged.

He punches in the speed-dial code for Watari.

"Hallo?" Gevanni answers right away, but sounds half-awake.

"On your way in today, could you get some more modeling clay?"

"Sure." If he's amused, his voice doesn't betray it.

Near picks up some of the faxes, sits in the castle, and starts looking through them. Heathrow on one side, Barajas on the other: is there any overlap? It's a long shot, even given how arrogant the killer is, but even long shots must be investigated.

By the time Gevanni arrives with the supplies, Near has three names of people who traveled between London and Madrid in the right timeframe. They seem to be a family, but he gives Gevanni the list for follow-up.

"How's it going?" Gevanni says.

Near shakes his head.

"If he's in there, you'll find him."

"The tapes will be more useful. I imagine he would've used fake papers. He might have tried to get cute with them, though, or been unable to get two fake IDs good enough to pass airport security."

"True, and playing for effect does make people sloppy," Gevanni agrees.

Near sighs. "But this is all assuming he flew in the first place."

He puts the lists aside for the moment and looks through the evidence photos quickly, knowing this is a bit obsessive, but still needing to do it. He doesn't make the puppets too detailed, but at least they have the right hair colors. When they're done, something unknots in his chest. He pats their heads and puts them in the courtyard of the castle. As an afterthought, he reaches for a marker and a generic-looking Lego person, and writes _Showoff_ across its chest. That figure goes facedown outside the wall.

Only one fax machine is still going, and the courier rings the buzzer downstairs a little before 8:30.

Rester and Lidner show up at nine on the dot, though Near didn't ask them to come in today. She's got three coffees and a hot chocolate, and he's carrying a bag from the doughnut shop.

"We thought you might want some extra eyes about now," Lidner says.

"Good timing," Near says. There's a lot of data to get through, and speed is a factor; he can't shake the feeling that this is going to get worse very soon. That's another problem with facing an opponent who knows where the board is when you don't.

Lidner passes out the drinks, Rester offers everyone doughnuts, and they get to work.

About noon, Gevanni comes into the media room. "Those three people check out fine."

Near pauses all the security footage playing back. He hasn't seen anyone likely yet, but it's only been three hours. "I thought they would."

"I've got two more who went from Madrid to London," Lidner says from her seat at the paper-strewn table.

"Nothing here, I'm afraid," Rester says.

"I made lunch," Gevanni says. "Why don't you guys take a break?"

Lidner pinches the bridge of her nose, and Rester hides a yawn.

"I think we could use one, yes," Near says.

Gevanni has made a _lot_ of sandwiches. Cream cheese and cucumber for Near, who got over the whole white-foods thing some time ago but appreciates the gesture; ham and cheese for Rester; portobello and spinach for Lidner. Near wonders if any of the three of them socialize on their own time, or if Gevanni just has a gift for guessing people's preferences. He doesn't know that; he doesn't even know what they do when they're not here.

_Hopeless_, Mello says softly.

"How about we go up on the roof? It's nice and warm today," Gevanni says.

It's unseasonably warm, in fact, and Rester and Lidner seem to perk up a bit in the bright sun. The bay is full of people taking advantage of the weather to go sailing.

"Good idea," Near tells Gevanni, who grins and pulls a folded blanket from beneath the sandwich tray.

"Hey, a real picnic!" Lidner says.

They sit on the lawn that Gevanni sometimes jokingly talks about using for bocce. Rester looks tolerantly amused. Near takes tiny bites of his sandwich—years of skipping meals and a naturally temperamental stomach mean he has to be careful—and tries to blink away the visual echoes of streams of people hurrying through airports. Rester and Lidner talk about her car.

"I don't take her out enough," she says. "It'd be dumb to drive to work. An hour to go twenty blocks, and then pay to park? No thanks."

"Tell me about it," Rester says.

Neither of them took the retirement package Near offered them after the Kira case. "Where do you two work?" he asks.

"I do security consultations for corporations," Lidner says, and Near remembers that her friend Keichi was one of Yotsuba's victims.

"I'm a consultant too," Rester says. "For NYPD's forensics department."

They both took jobs that let them choose when they work; Near doesn't have to ask to know it's deliberate.

_This means a lot to them_, Mello says.

* * *

They don't find anything more, though Near does spot the family whose names he picked out of the lists, and Lidner's obviously-honeymooning couple.

"I apologize for wasting your time," he tells Lidner and Rester when they discuss it. He's climbed back into the castle; Lidner sits on the floor outside it, and Rester stands in an at-ease posture, hands behind his back. Gevanni listens from the doorway of the media room.

"Don't apologize. We volunteered," Lidner says.

"Let's get a synopsis of what we know about this creep," Rester says. "We'll need it if we're going to help catch him."

"_Are_ you going to help?" Near says, rather amused than otherwise, and feeling a bit like he might be channeling Mello after all.

"Try and stop us," Lidner says, trying unsuccessfully not to smile.

"All right, then. Motives," Near says, getting right down to it and not bothering to look displeased. "There's money, of course."

"How do you figure?" Rester says.

"Bounties. There's always a price on L's head. It was ten million the last time I checked." He folds up some paper to make dolls, and starts cutting out archers.

The others look horrified, and Near smiles. "I like to know how much I'm worth. Of course, no one could prove I'm L. No one could prove I'm _anyone_. Technically, I don't exist at all."

Small hospitals in Wales are not known for their state-of-the-art record-keeping or security. It was laughably easy to eradicate one birth certificate.

"I don't think money is the issue here, though," Near says. "I think it's a combination of pride and revenge."

_If he gets his hands on one of those damn notebooks, we are royally fucked_, Mello says.

Near inwardly rolls his eyes; it hardly bears thinking about. "So. What do we know about _him_?"

"Middle- to upper-class," Rester says. "Probably no criminal background."

"Educated," Lidner says. "Well enough to account for the arrogance. If he's American. I'd guess Ivy League."

"He might be in law enforcement," Gevanni says. "He seems to know how to avoid common mistakes."

"OK," Near says. This all fits with his assumptions. "He has money to travel. He's probably unobtrusive. But unobtrusive in London is not necessarily so in Madrid. Let's find out if anyone around de la Cruz's home noticed an American or European tourist acting suspicious. Or," he adds, because Mello is never _completely_ out there, "possibly Japanese."

"Why Japanese?" Rester says.

"Who has the most reason to hate L?"

"Kira fags," Gevanni says, sounding as contemptuous as he ever has.

Near disapproves of his terminology, but understands the sentiment that prompted it. "I think the killer was a Kira supporter no matter what his nationality turns out to be. Since Japan benefited the most from Kira, there were a disproportionately large number of them there."

"There are still a lot of pro-Kira web sites," Lidner says, softly, as if afraid she might offend someone.

"Like cockroaches," Gevanni mutters.

"Maybe we should keep an eye on these bugs," Lidner finishes.

"That can't hurt," Near says. It's not much for them to do, but it's better than nothing, and he feels obscurely comforted knowing everyone will be back tomorrow.

* * *

"Near?" Gevanni says. "I think you'd better take a look at this." Rester and Lidner went home a while ago, and Near has been reviewing a case in Texas that might require L.

"What is it?"

Gevanni swivels his chair so Near can see his monitor. "It came to the Watari account."

The e-mail says only: _Get it yet?_

"Did you trace it?" Near says.

"Yeah. A public computer in a library in DC."

"He really is full of himself," Near says. "How insulting to imply we wouldn't have started working on the case." It's only been two days since Carruthers's death, but how slow does this guy think L is?

To all appearances, though, he was _counting_ on them having noticed. Why gloat? It's unnecessary, and gives them another piece of information.

_You gloat when you're sure you're winning_, Mello says.

"What makes him sure he's winning?" Near wonders out loud. "When you contact the Spanish police, could you ask if anyone noticed anything odd in the de la Cruz investigation? Something they might have thought they imagined, or that was too strange to mention to L?"

"Sure."

"The fact that he contacted Watari supports your law-enforcement theory."

"It might. It's not that hard to get this address, depending on your connections. He used one of the anonymized ones." L—the first L—wanted private citizens to be able to contact him, but he also wanted it to be a challenge, so that only the savvy and determined would get through. Information on Watari is a mess of contradictions and red herrings almost as tangled as information on L.

"Is it an older one?"

"Yeah. It forwards from the original address, in fact."

"That could be useful."

"I'll check it out."

* * *

"It's no use," Gevanni says a bit later. "Almost anyone could have this address, it's been out there so long. This guy could be a cop, a hacker, or... I don't know. Sorry."

"That's all right. In the future, we should keep a tighter rein on these addresses."

"Should I disable the account?"

"No. He might use it again."

"Oh, right." Gevanni scrubs a hand through his hair. "I'd better make some coffee. Want some?"

"Yes, thank you."

Gevanni goes off to the kitchen for a bit, and comes back with a mug for Near and a demitasse for himself. "I still say you'd like _my_ espresso."

"It's all too bitter. I can't get it past my nose." He takes a sip of the coffee. Gevanni put more sugar in than usual—not quite L-worthy sweet sludge, but enough to give an extra kick of alertness. "This is perfect. How did you know?"

Gevanni shrugs, smiling. "I think it goes with the title."

"You don't have to stay up with me," Near says.

"Oh, I don't mind. It's almost time to call Madrid, anyway."

"Thank you." Mr. Wammy was like a father to L; Gevanni is more like an older brother who stands between Near and the world, and understands him without ever asking for needless explanations. "When I asked you to be Watari, why did you agree?"

"You expected me to, didn't you?" Gevanni says.

"That's not an answer."

"I know. I meant: surely you'd thought about what the pros and cons would be for me."

"Insofar as I could." He knew even less about Gevanni's life then, but he was pretty sure he'd take the job. Gevanni was always the most passionate of the SPK. Lidner cared about catching her friend's killers, and Rester acted as if he were trying to establish a new standard for terse efficiency, but Gevanni seemed to see working on the Kira case as a personal proving ground.

"From the start with the SPK, I felt like I was part of something truly important," Gevanni says. "A hell of a lot more so than when I was doing surveillance. Mostly, I didn't want to give that up. You're... well, you don't need me to tell you you're amazing."

He forgets, sometimes, that it's emotions that drive most other people, and he doesn't always account for them. (Mello the seed in the random-number generator, the static that brought the system down.) "I understand," Near says, and he thinks he really does, this time.

* * *

Once it's early enough here, and late enough there, for business hours in Spain, Gevanni calls them with the follow-up questions. He doesn't have a chance to ask any of them. He listens, and turns pale.

Near watches him, trying to tamp down a spark of alarm. "What?"

"The Madrid office says their lead investigator died yesterday."

"How?" Of _all_ the times to have nothing in his hands. He gets a rocket from the battle formation by the door, and Gevanni follows him, still talking on the phone.

"Heart attack."

"What time?"

Gevanni asks. "Three-thirty."

Near's already reaching for the phone with the voice distorter.

"This is L," he says when the British office answers. "May I speak to Mr. Parrish, please?"

The little pause tells him it's not good. "I'm sorry to tell you this, L, but Mr. Parrish passed away unexpectedly."

"Yesterday?"

"Yes. A sudden heart attack."

"Do you know what time?"

"Two-thirty."

"Thank you for the information. My condolences to your team." He clicks the phone off and stares at the rocket. There's no fighting the spark of fear now.

Simultaneous heart attacks eight hundred miles apart: the giveaway mode of death. No, the default. Even without a photographic memory, Near would not have forgotten those rules.

_I wouldn't call us "royally fucked," but this is very bad._

"Near?" Gevanni says.

He shakes his head, goes to retrieve the generic Lego. He wipes "Showoff" from the chest, and writes, in tiny letters, and with a tight precision only Mello would recognize as anger: S-Kira.

* * *

Notes: I know, shameless chapter break for dramatic effect. There is a reason I _had_ to make Near originally from Wales. A big virtual cookie to anyone who guesses it. :-)


	3. The Hermit, the Chariot, and the Moon

**Chapter 3: The Hermit, the Chariot, and the Moon**

Gevanni follows him to the main room. Near looks up from fixing the Lego, his mind whirling with calculations, conjectures about the killer's next move, possibilities for stopping him. "He _is_ after L. He's after me."

Gevanni kneels down and looks at the new label. "Do I even want to know how sure you are?"

"A hundred percent," Near murmurs.

"Our information's out there."

"I'll talk to Mr. Aizawa right away. But if S-Kira knew the NPA had it, he would have manipulated them into sending it by now." Gevanni's stricken expression doesn't change, and Near feels there's something more he ought to do. Carefully, he puts a hand on his arm. "Don't worry."

Gevanni nods, obviously more comforted by contact than by the facts.

_Still hopeless_, Mello says.

Luckily, it's not yet the end of the day in Japan, and Near reaches Aizawa easily.

"Is there any publicly available information about your team?" he asks, without preamble.

"No. Not since..."

"I see. Please make sure it stays that way. And please have everyone use aliases when interacting with anyone unknown. I know that will be difficult, but I believe it's necessary."

"You're not saying—"

"It's a precaution."

"There's another of those murder notebooks out there, isn't there?"

Near sighs. "Yes. If you follow my instructions, your people will be all right. But please look out for any suspicious behavior."

"L, don't you think we deserve a little more information than that?"

"I think this new Kira may try to get information about me from you. He could use the notebook to do that. Right now he's concentrating on people who have recently worked with me, but it's not impossible that he could guess the NPA might know something."

Aizawa clearly suppresses a groan. "I almost wish I hadn't asked. I'd say we'll help all we can, but..."

"I'll let you know," Near says, and disconnects.

Gevanni was eavesdropping without bothering to hide it.

"I do think they'll be safe. I wouldn't lie about that," Near says.

"I know you wouldn't."

"It's a good thing L has a reputation for working alone." He gets two more Lego people, and labels one Parrish and the other Fernandez. It's good enough for now.

"S... S-Kira had to manufacture cases, because he couldn't find any existing ones?" Gevanni says.

"That's what I think. He's definitely researching L, though. Do what you can to obfuscate the public information of people who might seem like they've worked with L recently. There shouldn't be too much out there to begin with. S-Kira won't get anything from them, but I do not want them to die."

Gevanni nods. "I'll get the word out."

Near goes back to the card castle and opens a new deck to make an inner wall.

_He'll know by now that he fucked up_, Mello says.

What will S-Kira do next? What would someone like this have learned from his idol's defeat? S-Kira would not have shot Carruthers and de la Cruz if he weren't trying to hide his possession of the notebook. The secret's out now.

Mello says, _We're winning. We know more than he wants us to. If we're lucky, he'll get pissed._

_I wouldn't count on that._

Kira supporters were a varied, and mostly stupid, group. They were easily manipulated, but someone hoping to take over as Kira himself is a different story. He is patient; he has planned ahead. L needs to take advantage of his mistake.

_Not the Fool this time_, Near thinks, flipping that card face-up. _Not Death either. Certainly not Justice._

He turns over the Moon, and sees the description in his mind's eye as clearly as if reading it from the book. _It illuminates our animal nature, types of which are represented below—the dog, the wolf and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast. It strives to attain manifestation, symbolized by crawling from the abyss of water to the land, but as a rule it sinks back whence it came._

That fits.

The finger puppets are too heavy for the castle to support, so Near takes the Hermit and Chariot cards and stands them up in the tallest tower. The Moon gets pinned to the floor with a dart.

_I'm flattered you made me major arcana, _Mello says.

_I would never have heard the end of it if I hadn't._

He writes down all the rules he knows about the notebook, then picks up the L and Mello puppets and makes them look at the list.

_I wish you could help me_, he tells them.

He said he only talked to L once, but this was only technically true. He talked to L-the-construct once. It had little to do with Ryuzaki, his friend.

Near was only four when they first met, and hadn't been at Wammy's House very long. They had given him a battery of tests, some of which he'd done before.

The people at the House were better than most. Some of the teachers treated Near like a little kid, and were baffled when he didn't act like one, but overall they were a lot better than the nurses, who had meant well, but been stupid.

Everyone felt sorry for him at the hospital, and their sympathy was worse than nothing at all would have been. Only by repeating his requests incessantly and being uncooperative until they were met did he make anyone take him seriously.

He just wanted... He wanted his _mum_, but he knew she was gone. He wanted to be clean and cool, and never to smell a fire again. Stubbornness was the only weapon he had, and he used it shamelessly to make the nurses bring him new white clothes. Knowing the compulsion was irrational didn't make it possible for him to wear anything else, and he decided he would claim eccentricity once he was old enough that people wouldn't think he was trying to be cute in doing so.

It was almost certainly Meghan who contacted Wammy's House. She was the one nurse who didn't talk to Near as though he were a baby, who brought him toys and puzzles even though she wasn't supposed to.

The puzzles were too easy, but they were something to do with his hands. For the first and last time, Near used activity as a substitute for thinking, solving one over and over, so he wouldn't remember that he didn't have anyone who could take care of him, and would certainly be sent to an institution.

The man he later knew as Mr. Wammy came to the hospital and talked to him for a while, and watched him working that same too-easy puzzle, and took him to the House that same day.

There were a lot of other kids there, loud and strange and old enough that Near wouldn't have known how to talk to them even if he'd wanted to. He mostly sat alone in his room, playing with the action figures Meghan had given him, and sometimes reworking the puzzle. He hadn't found any better ones yet.

He'd been there about a week when an older boy peeked into his room. "Hello?" This boy seemed a little scary, like a crow, with messy black hair, and bony arms like awkward wings, and his eyes were deep and black-rimmed.

"Hello," Near said softly.

"I'm Ryuzaki. Mr. Wammy told me about you." He held out a box. "I brought you something that might be a better challenge."

It was a large puzzle with a picture of lots of candy on it; the pieces would all be very similar. "Thank you." Near wasn't used to making conversation, but he was curious about this boy. "Do you live here too?"

"I used to. Now I have a job."

Near dumped out all the pieces right away and started sorting them. "What kind of job?"

Ryuzaki paused, the kind of pause older people often gave when trying to figure out how much to tell kids. "I'm a detective."

Near looked up at him consideringly, and decided he had no reason to lie, even if he didn't look old enough. "They let you leave? No one comes to adopt the kids here."

"It wasn't a matter of letting me. Hm. You already noticed that? Well, no. No one comes to adopt anyone. It's a special orphanage for really smart kids."

Near frowned, and decided to address the more relevant question first. "Why have an orphanage like that?"

Ryuzaki studied him for a moment. "You'll probably hate hearing this, but you'll find out when you're older. We think it's best if not too many people know." He seemed sincere, and he _was_ friendlier than most people.

"What if I don't like it when I find out?" Near said.

Ryuzaki knelt down and started helping him flip pieces over. "Think of it as more like a school. You'll learn how to be a detective too. You don't have to, of course."

Near didn't answer. It sounded _interesting_, and interesting was hard to come by.

"We all have aliases here," Ryuzaki went on. "You can pick yours if you like."

Near loved pretend games already: building houses for his figures and inventing their life stories. Getting a new name seemed almost like a special kind of pretend that would work in the real world. He could pretend he'd never been the little boy called Nate, the one who was scared and alone. He didn't even have to be the same little boy who had spent a seeming eternity in the hospital, feeling trapped by the oxygen and IV lines, wanting nothing more than for everyone to leave him _alone_, because only time would make him better. But what name? "I don't know what to choose."

Ryuzaki glanced over, wearing a small smile. "Near, I think."

He didn't really appreciate the joke until later, and Mello.

_Just what are you implying?_ Mello says.

Near smiles a little, and finishes the last of the inner wall. The castle still needs something else. Gevanni would hate it if he made a moat; he rolled his eyes—very discreetly, of course—at the kiddie pool for the ducks.

Once the first Kira case began, L never visited the House again. Near talked to him a few times, but L was never very specific. Near thinks, now, if he had known...

But you don't know. You don't get to say goodbye in war-time. Afterwards, you have time to honor the fallen, even if you can't cry for them.

Matsuda pulled Near aside after the end, and awkwardly, as if ashamed, told him about the secret funeral service they'd had for L. "It feels wrong," he said. "You were his family."

Near remembers finding it odd at the time that his first thought was, _Mello would know what to say._ He thanked Matsuda, and meant it, and thought of having Roger arrange to move the grave. But that seemed wrong, too. So he visited before leaving Japan, and left a huge bouquet of poppies there. He knew L would understand.

He knew, too, that it looked strange to people when he stood for a while at the edge of an apparently-unremarkable stretch of road in Tokyo, smelling cigarette smoke long since dissipated, seeing shells long since cleaned up, Gevanni standing nervously beside him.

He couldn't face the burned-out church in Nagano, but he still dreams about it sometimes.

_It's not like I was there anymore,_ Mello says.

_I still wish I could have gone there. I thought I was stronger than that._

_Come on. You fuckin' won, and you needed me to do it._

Near looks at the Mello and L figures again. _I need you both now. We have to find him before he finds us._

_You prepared to kill him if that's what it takes?_

_That's always a last resort, Mello._

He shrugs._ Even when we've seen the world go to shit before?_

_Always. L is not a killer._

He's still thinking about it in the morning, when Lidner and Rester come in early. Lidner takes one look at Near and Gevanni and says, "What happened?"

"The detective killer has a death note."

"How did you find out?" Rester says.

Near explains the investigators' deaths. "He didn't want us to know about the notebook yet," he adds. "When we get it, I'm sure we'll find those names and an instruction like 'Sends L's location to this address before dying in an accident.' He was too specific.

"There's also the matter of that email message. It seemed out of character, but it wasn't. Anyone committed to being a criminal would want L out of the way, but only someone with an advantage in reserve would be arrogant enough to _tell_ L about it."

He doesn't say _Mello thinks so too_, though it's true.

"He has another weak point. His shinigami doesn't seem to be very helpful. S-Kira had to discover the limitations himself."

Rester and Lidner exchange a look at his use of the Kira name, as if that makes it real to them too. Near has already decided what he needs to say, and he doesn't let himself hesitate. "If any of you want to leave, now would be a good time. Even you, Ge— Stephen."

He looks a little surprised at the deliberate use of his first name. Lidner smiles and shakes her head. Rester raises an eyebrow.

"Are you _kidding_?" Gevanni says.

"Let's get him," Lidner says.

* * *

**Chapter 3 notes**: There's no huge significance to the Wales thing. It was just my little cross-fandom joke, because Bran Davies, the Welsh boy in the Dark is Rising series, has white hair. Tarot equivalencies for Mello & Near were done first by the Balgus REC/Sabi (I assume, since the art I have uses the same code alphabet as "Angelic Reeds"), but I swear they're the same cards I would've picked for them. :-) The word-for-word quote Near thinks of is from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by Waite. The poppies are a reference to "In Flanders Fields."


	4. Challenge

Yes, this took _forever_, for which I'm very sorry! But if you're one of those readers who skip ahead to the naughty parts, this is the chapter to which you'd skip. :-)

**Chapter 4: Challenge**

Rester and Lidner take the list of rules to refresh their memories, and Gevanni continues looking through the pro-Kira message boards online. Near flips through pages in his mental library, pulls the King of Cups, Page of Swords, and Knight of Swords from the tarot deck closest to hand, and sets them in the tower with the Hermit and the Chariot.

He has to hunt around for the Lego shinigami from years ago. He puts it outside the castle, but not with the Moon; it's not on S-Kira's side.

What if they composed a message designed to provoke a response? All four deaths are a matter of public record. Near's surprised, in fact, that no Kira conspiracy theorist has yet put the pieces together.

He takes the L finger puppet into the computer room and starts skimming through messages so he'll be able to mimic the style.

Lidner and Rester are bickering good-naturedly about bureaucracy in the shinigami realm, and both come over to offer suggestions.

"Be sure to misspell 'definitely,'" Lidner says, and Gevanni laughs at his own monitor, quietly, as if he's not quite sure he should.

"She's got a point," he says. "We don't want to seem _too_ smart."

"Or too up on the case," Rester chimes in. "Include some irrelevant details, or leave one of the relevant ones out."

Near glances around at them, half-smiling. "Like someone who doesn't know the true significance of what he's discovered."

They work on that, and brainstorm about possible ways to exploit the rules they know, but S-Kira might not. The mood is noticeably different from when they were working on the C-Kira case, and Near wonders why.

_You're all in it together now,_ Mello says.

_We have been an efficient team all along._

He can all but see Mello rolling his eyes. _Haven't you learned yet?_

_***_

"There's another," Rester says when he comes back from lunch. "I saw on the news that Peter Stavrosky was found dead."

The card Near's holding snaps out of his hand, but, luckily, it sails harmlessly away.

"What's wrong?' Lidner says.

"That's a lie." They all look at him. He sighs. "Stavrosky is me. I mean, he's L."

Gevanni knew this, of course, but Rester and Lidner didn't. "As too many people found out," Near explains, "Eraldo Coil and Alain Danuve were L's alter egos. He had others whose covers weren't blown, and it seemed useful to maintain some of them. Stavrosky was one of those."

"So," Lidner says. "I'm sorry, but... who's dead?"

Near looks at her gravely. "I don't know."

Now_ we're royally fucked_, Mello says.

_We? It's not as though he can hurt you._

_Hey, alleged genius. If _you_ go, _I_ go. As deeply, _deeply_ weird as your mind is, it's kinda all I got._

"Stavrosky had a reputation for always being able to solve kidnapping cases without any harm coming to the victim. His methods and priorities were too much like L's. If the killer targeted him, he would have known that. When he realized Stavrosky was essentially a virtual construct, he must have figured out the rest He wanted the public to know he was continuing to target detectives, and he wanted us to know..." Near pauses, and scowls. "That he wouldn't hesitate to kill innocents for show."

"We're on it," Gevanni says.

"Warn the local authorities to take the usual precautions."

_He's getting less subtle_, Mello says. _He wants you to think this was your fault._

_You would know about that_, Near tells him.

_He's an amateur._ Mello sounds almost offended. _I had a dozen reasons for doing that._

_Four by my count._

_Still better than him._

_Do you _want_ to make me angry?_

_You should try it sometime._

He _is_ angry, in fact. How does one protect people who don't exist? The aliases are doing their job too well. Near should have anticipated, he thinks, that someone would use them against L someday. Not taking precautions, allowing one to be discovered by sheer dumb luck—it's unforgivable.

He looks at the photo they've obtained of the victim. His eyes are closed in the deceptively peaceful way coroners always do it. He's an older man, who would've looked distinguished and intelligent in life. _My substitute_, Near thinks. "Whoever you were," he tells the picture, "I'm sorry."

He gives the Stavrosky Lego grey hair, but a white outfit.

Lidner and Gevanni say their goodbyes and leave, but Rester gathers his things and hovers by the door, and clears his throat, self-consciously.

"Yes? Was there something else?" Near says.

Rester sets a shopping bag by him on the floor. "My wife, uh. Likes to knit. I told her you probably wouldn't wear it—" He trails off as Near opens the bag.

It's a sweater, white of course, but with a barely-noticeable thread of silver running through the yarn. It's thick and soft, and maybe he ought to _try_ wearing something he wouldn't usually.

"I told her a little about you, but I said you were an intern."

Near looks up at him. "Thank you. I like it very much."

Rester shrugs. "It gets cold up there."

***

_Mello? What... What are my weak points? What will S-Kira try to exploit?_

_You're alone._

_That's not—_

_I _know_, listen. He doesn't know about the SPK. But he does know L doesn't have any peers. Hell, I'm the closest you got, and I'm, you know. Not real. He's been trying to call you out the whole time because he assumes no one'll come out with you._

_I wouldn't want them to._

_Don't be stupid. You're tired._

_I guess I _should _rest._ He goes to his room and curls up on the bed, data still running through his mind: L's remaining aliases, and the chances of any of them being discovered.

Mello's sitting on a couch in what looks like the warehouse where he and Matt lived, and throws back his head and groans. _Quit that. Just fuckin' relax._

_Easier said than done._

_Hey, Halle likes you._

_Mello, don't be irrelevant._

_I'm just sayin'._

_Even if she did, and I were interested, which I'm not, it would be impossible. We have to work together._

_Aren't you curious? You can't be as cold as you pretend._

_I don't pretend. And I must have told you a hundred times by now: I have emotions. I just don't let them dictate my actions._ _And I'm not curious. _It's not a lie.

Really, Near doesn't care if people think he's cold. He'd rather that than let them see he's the opposite, that sometimes it seems it would be so easy to let go. (_Jump_, Mello whispers, those times.) That sometimes, alone with his secret thoughts at night, he feels as if he might burn up, feels that his heart will pound out of his chest, and has to cover his mouth with his free hand to keep from crying out.

_Never _been_ curious? _Mello says, wide-eyed.

_Once._

_About me?_ He inspects his nail polish with feigned nonchalance. _There's all _kinds_ of things I would've done for you if I'd known you were bent that way._

It's difficult to admit even under these circumstances. _I've never wanted anyone but you, Mello._

_Huh. Kinda sucks to be you, then._

_Not really. I'd rather have an imaginary Mello than anyone real._

_Dude. That's sad._

_It doesn't make me sad._ It's easier, really, less fraught with potential complications.

Nothing in real life can measure up to what he can do in his head, anyway. Only one moment has even come close, and it was forever ago, now: the time Mello shoved him against the wall at the House and whispered threats, or promises, that made Near's head spin.

"Oh, I'll get you someday," Mello said, and his breath, hot against Near's skin, almost made him shiver.

"What are you talking about?" He remembers thinking, _You could hurt me if you really meant to_, but even then, he picked up on the weird tension.

Mello's grip eased slightly. He slid one hand around the back of Near's neck, fingers tangling into his hair; and he was so _close_, the green of his eyes like a flame with barium in it. Near went helplessly still, surprised—he's surprised now, remembering it—that neither of them could hear his heartbeat.

Mello bent close again. "You'll see," he whispered. "No one's ever touched you. Bet you're really sensitive. It wouldn't take much..."

Maybe it was the power of suggestion, or maybe Mello was right, but Near thought he could feel the whorls of his fingerprints as he slipped his hand beneath the shirt and drew it slowly back up along his spine. "No," he said. He didn't _quite_ know what Mello was thinking of, but he was starting to get it. That flame in his eyes could've burned them both up.

"No," Mello agreed. "Not much at all to make you lose control."

_I can't_, Near thought. And: _I want to._ "Mello..." he said. _Kiss me_, he wanted to say. _Show me what you mean. I'll let you do anything._ But of course Mello didn't want him to _let_ him. So Near twisted away, and said "Stop," as steadily as he could, and Mello didn't follow him.

And that was two days before Mello left for good, and Near never found out if he meant it, or if it was just another skirmish in their long war.

"I wish I could touch you," he says now, mouthing the words more than even whispering.

_I know._

He brushes his fingers over his mouth, and remembers how he couldn't look for more than a moment when Mello came to get his picture, how he didn't think he could see him without feeling a futile, foolish urge to touch his face.

_I wouldn't have let you_, Mello says.

_It wasn't pity._

_I don't mean fucking _pity.

It would have been admitting too much, tipping the balance too far. _It was too late for us._

_Near... It was always too late for me._

"I wanted to save you," Near whispers, and curls up even tighter.

_Shh,_ Mello says. _Go to sleep._

***

Always, Near has needed to be exhausted almost to the point of hallucinating to sleep at all. It's the only way his mind will slow down enough, and even that only lasts a few hours.

He dreams about the end again, the church in flames. But this time it shifts, and he's there with Mello, watching it burn. He turns away and hides his face against Mello's shoulder.

"It's not the same," Mello says, but it is; the reek of smoke, the blackened bricks. Loss. Near looks down and sees flecks of ash clinging to his sleeves.

"No," he says. "No, no, not again."

"It's OK," Mello says, pulling him away from the heat of the fire and into his arms. "It's OK. You can't fix everything. You can't _control_ everything." He takes hold of the shirt and shakes the fabric so the ash flies away. "There. White again."

"Thank you," Near whispers.

Mello tilts Near's chin so he has to look up at him. "Hey." The scar is gone, and he looks... happy? "I had to do it." He brushes a curl back from Near's forehead, bends and presses his lips there. "It wasn't so bad." He moves to his cheek, the corner of his mouth. "At least I went out in style."

"Like a Viking?"

"Like a fucking hero," Mello says, and kisses him.

Near wakes up half-thinking he can taste chocolate and feel the brush of a furred collar against his face, and he wills sleep to return, but of course it won't. It's still dark outside. He's shivery and aroused and feels irrationally cheated.

_I'm still with you_, Mello says. _Don't be shy._

So Near imagines that the hand cupping him through the thin pants is Mello's, and that Mello's hair brushes his face as he leans close and whispers, _Ah, I knew it wouldn't take much._

_It never did, with you._ He slips his other hand into his hair and closes his fingers tightly, because gentle is one thing Mello would never be. Mello would shove the t-shirt up and flick a black-painted nail at a nipple hard enough to make Near gasp. Mello would bite his neck and tear impatiently at the drawstring of the pajama pants.

_I've got it_, Near tells him, pulling the knot loose.

His hand is cold, but Mello's would be warm; he arches into the imagined touch. _I want_, he'd say, _I don't even know what I want._

_You never would have let me take you in real life_, Mello says.

_I might have done._ But it's true that what he imagines isn't really about the sexual act. It's about how Mello would look at him, with an almost transcendent intensity, how his eyes would pin him, because of course he wouldn't let Near look away.

_Damn right_, Mello says. _I'd wanna see your face when you come, and know I did it, and know _you_ knew._

Near can see him more clearly than ever, can almost _feel_ him, and he gasps into his pillow, and thrusts into his hand, and thinks, _Mello Mello Mello_.

***

_What would L do?_ he thinks, but this time he doesn't mean their mentor. He means the L he _wants_ to be, the one who's himself _and_ Mello.

_Kick his ass_, Mello says.

_That's your style, not mine_, Near tells him.

Mello sighs theatrically, patience gone. _Oh, for the love of fuck_, he says. _Are you L, or aren't you?_

_You think I should confront him?_

_You want to end it, don't you?_

_I won't let him kill anyone else._

_Then you're gonna have to be the one to do it._

_I know._

_Are you scared?_

_Of course_. Attempting to lie to his own subconscious would be the height of pointlessness.

_We can do this._

_I wish one of us had said that when you were alive._

Mello doesn't have an answer for that, but Near didn't really expect one. He picks up the Lego with the incongruously cute skull face and studies it.

_The eyes are a problem_, Mello says.

_Yes. I'm worried about them too._ If S-Kira had them, though, he would be trying to get to L in person instead of attempting to extract the information from others.

_Wish you hadn't burned those notebooks yet?_

_I would never wish that._ He did consider their potential future usefulness before doing it, but there was no possible way he could have allowed them to exist in this world, and no way, either, he could have simply handed them back to the shinigami. He would have felt responsible for every death they went on to cause.

He's still not sure what he thinks about the shinigami. Can anything be called truly evil when all it does is act according to its nature?

Its nature... They can conclude a number of things about the shinigami too...

He's still thinking about it when the others arrive and go back to sorting through travel records, responses to their post, and evidence from the Stavrosky crime scene.

"I got the admins for that message board to send me the archives," Gevanni calls. "Look at this guy."

Near and Lidner come over and look. "The fact that he writes in complete sentences sets him apart," Lidner says dryly.

"He certainly seems arrogant," Near says. "Where is he?"

Gevanni smiles. "More public libraries, but all in Philadelphia."

"He also replied to us," Lidner says. "He says it's stupid to assume Kira's back based on coincidences."

"That's him. He isn't ready to go public yet, and couldn't go back and cover his tracks after he found the notebook. Thank you."

Near picks up a dart and launches it toward the Moon card on the dartboard. "Here's something I've never said before: This is crazy, but it just might work."


End file.
